In illustration of what we have said concerning the persistence of the monks in refusing to part with their books, we may cite the evidence of a traveller—the Sieur Granger, who visited the Natron monasteries in the year 1730. He says, that the buildings at that time were falling into decay, and the dust destroying the books and manuscripts, of which the monks made no use whatever. Their own patriarch had represented to them that the sum which the books would produce would be sufficient to enable them to restore their churches and to rebuild their cells: but they declared they would rather be buried in the ruins. Lord Prudhoe visited the monasteries in 1828. After much difficulty he got access to a chamber in which was a trap-door, through which he “descended, candle in hand, to examine the manuscripts, where books and parts of books, and scattered leaves, in Coptic, Ethiopic, Syriac, and Arabic, were lying in a mass, on which,” he says, “I stood.... To appearance it seemed as if, on some sudden emergency, the whole library had been thrown for security down this trap-door, and that they had remained undisturbed in their dust and neglect for some centuries.”[7]
In this manner it is that we feel our way from century to century, keeping an eye all the way upon those remains of a distant time, the safe transmission of which is our immediate theme. In this transit we are now reaching the shore of the times we live in. Those fragments of the Gospels which already we have mentioned, and many other highly important manuscripts, which are now in the British Museum, were obtained at different times by Dr. Tattam (Archdeacon of Bedford), who twice visited Egypt expressly for this purpose. In one of these monasteries, in a vault, the manuscripts and fragments of books covered the floor, eight inches deep, where they had laid, apparently, many years. As many as 317 books, entire or in part, were then purchased, and they safely reached their destination: most of them are on vellum; some on paper—all in Syriac, Aramaic, or Coptic; and these, with those before obtained, made 360 volumes of manuscripts. Some of these volumes contain two, three, or four distinct works, written at different periods, but bound up together:—altogether perhaps containing not fewer than a thousand manuscripts—derived from Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt, and belonging to different times, from the fifth to the thirteenth century. In fact, it now appears that a few of them are of a much higher antiquity than the fifth century.
In the course of time, as the Mahometan influence extended itself throughout the East, and became more and more exclusive and intolerant, the Christian recluses of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Arabia gradually retired, or were driven westward, bringing with them, when they could do so, their books. Thus it was that the monasteries of the Egyptian desert became stored with these manuscripts in the languages of the East, and especially of Syria and Arabia.
The separate books of the Old and New Testament, or fragments of them, abound in these recovered stores. Liturgies, and Lives of the Saints, the spurious Gospels also, and the works of the early Christian writers, together with the canons of Councils, are also largely present among them; and altogether, many additions to religious literature, and some few to classic literature, have hence accrued. Among these recoveries, in the department of Christian literature, we should name the three Epistles of St. Ignatius—believed to be the only genuine epistles of this father. Fragments also of what are termed the Festal Epistles of St. Athanasius, in Syriac, have been found in the same manner; and the circumstances attaching to this one instance, as narrated by the learned editor, are so characteristic of the times and places which we have now in view, that they may properly be reported in this place; the more so because the publications in which these accounts first appeared, are of a kind rarely coming under the eye of general readers.
It was the custom of the patriarchs—and thus of Athanasius, during the forty years of his official life—to address a circular-letter each year to his clergy, informing them of the day in which the Easter solemnities were to be observed. Nothing more than some fragments of these Epistles, in the Greek original, had reached modern times. But it is now a Syriac version of many of them that has come to light.
The treasures of Syriac literature obtained by Dr. Tattam, in Egypt, as we have already mentioned, were deposited in the British Museum: it was a vast mass—a chaos of manuscripts and fragments; there were volumes, and parts of volumes, and single sheets, and torn fragments of sheets, large and small. This mass of commingled materials was consigned to the care of Dr. Cureton, as belonging to his department; and it became his duty to examine, and to report concerning the whole—a task which seemed to defy human skill and industry. This labour, which at first appeared to need no addition, was, however, afterwards doubled by the arrival of another mass, almost equal to the first; for the fact had transpired that the monks, who received payment as for their entire library, had contrived to hold back a large portion of the whole; which, however, was afterwards obtained by means of a further payment.
A laborious adjustment of these materials—part to part—resulted in bringing to light several Syriac versions of treatises of which the titles were known, but of which the Greek originals have been lost. Among these, and claiming to be noticed, are some of the writings of Eusebius, the ecclesiastical historian; and with them the Theophania, or “Manifestation of Christ,” of which an English translation has been published, by the late Dr. Lee. The manuscript of this Syriac work appears, by dates attached to it, to be not less than fifteen hundred years old, and in fact to have been written a few years only later than the time of the publication of the original treatise.
A curious circumstance connected with one of these ancient manuscripts is mentioned by Dr. Cureton. To one of the leaves of this manuscript—midway in the volume, there is attached a note to this effect: “Behold, my brethren, if it should happen that the end of this ancient book should be torn off and lost, together with the writer’s subscription and termination, it was written at the end of it thus: viz. that this book was written at Orrhoa, a city of Mesopotamia (Edessa), by the hands of a man named Jacob, in the year seven hundred and twenty-three, in the month Tishrin the latter it was completed; and agreeably to what was written there, I have written also here, without addition, and which I wrote in the year one thousand and three hundred and ninety-eight of the era of the Greeks.”
These dates, according to our era, correspond with the years A.D. 411, for the time of the transcription of the volume, and A.D. 1086 for that of the note. What this writer anticipated as probable did actually take place; for the end of the sheet containing the original note of the copyist had been torn off and lost; how small then appeared the probability that the actual fragment should have escaped so many risks of utter destruction, and that it should be recovered. Yet so it was! In the mass of fragments which were afterwards obtained, and brought to England, there were several bundles, promiscuously made up, and consisting of separate leaves or parts of leaves, which were in fact the gatherings and sweepings from the floor, after the principal volumes had been taken up.
“One by one,” says Dr. Cureton, “I untied the bundles (there were about twenty) and diligently and eagerly examined their contents. As I opened the fourth I was delighted at recognising two pieces belonging to one of the leaves of this precious book; in the next I found a third: and now, reader, if thou hast any love for the records of antiquity; if thou feelest any kindred enthusiasm in such pursuits as these; if thou hast ever known the satisfaction of having a dim expectation gradually brightened into reality, and an anxious research rewarded with success,—things that but rarely happen to us in this world of disappointment—I leave it to thine own imagination to paint the sensations which I experienced at that moment, when the loosing of the cord of the seventh bundle disclosed to my sight a small fragment of beautiful vellum, in a well-known hand, upon which I read the following words.”...